Addie tried a faint laugh. “If you think the farmer who comes in every night had anything to do with the shooting, you’re wrong. I don’t know his name, but he’s a nice guy. He doesn’t get along with his wife, so he eats in the diner a lot. Mostly for the company. Couldn’t be the food.”
Alvarez listened with seeming patience. “He might have had nothing to do with the shooting, but he might have seen something. Maybe he saw these other customers when they suddenly decided to leave. Tell me about them.”
“About who?”
“The four customers at the counter.” Alvarez spoke slowly, as though Addie had trouble understanding English. “Did you know their names?”
Kendrick, Robbie, Brett, Zane. Good thing telepathy wasn’t real or Addie would have just given them up. I hope they’re all right.
“Or at least what they looked like,” Alvarez prompted. Hickson simply sat and listened, and the recorder made a faint, electronic hum.
Someone knocked on the door of the stuffy room. Hickson calmly rose and answered it.
Kendrick walked in. His hair was slicked down on his head, the strands arranged so the white wasn’t as obvious through the black. He carried a leather folder in one hand, and he was wearing a suit. Coat, slacks, ivory-colored shirt, tie and all.
Where the hell did he get a suit? was Addie’s first dazed thought. And doesn’t he look good in it?
No, he looked damn good in it. The coat hugged broad shoulders, the collar and tie framed his square face, the slacks skimmed athletic legs. He looked like a corporate pinup guy, like the billionaires on the covers of romances her sister devoured.
Addie imagined him coming home after a hard day’s work, loosening his tie, slinging down his coat, unbuttoning his shirt, giving her a promising look from his green eyes . . .
She nearly swallowed her tongue. Once she regained control of it, she realized he was speaking.
“I’m Ms. Price’s attorney.” Kendrick produced a business card from his pocket and set it on the table in front of Alvarez. “I’m advising her to answer no more questions and requesting that you release her if you have not brought formal charges. She is an unfortunate victim here, not a perpetrator.”
Well, that at least was true. Addie pressed her mouth closed and tried to look like an unfortunate victim.
Alvarez studied Addie for a time. He didn’t want to let her go, she saw. He wanted to charge her for maybe being an accessory to the shootout, maybe for robbery. But Bo could not have reported five thousand dollars missing, because he never kept that kind of money in the diner. Five hundred possibly, but never five grand.
Alvarez had no evidence. Hickson had searched Addie’s car, finding nothing but her change of clothes and her purse. No weapons, ammunition, a phone with calls to a boyfriend to come and open fire on the diner. Addie’s call log showed her sister, a few girlfriends, and that was it. Addie, since her bad breakup a while back, didn’t have much of a social life.
Alvarez scowled at Kendrick, then he hid his disappointment and nodded at Hickson. “Stay close to home, Ms. Price, in case I need to speak to you again.”
Kendrick closed his hands around his folder and waited. Addie, after a heartbeat or two, sprang to her feet. “Right. Thank you.” She nodded at Alvarez and Hickson with as much dignity as she could and followed Kendrick out.
Addie managed to keep her mouth shut all the way down the white-tiled halls of the courthouse and sheriff’s department. At the door, her purse and clothes were returned, but not, she noticed, the money. She could protest about that, but then they might come up with a charge to keep her there.
She took up her stuff and jogged along beside Kendrick, out into the cool darkness of the Texas night.